How it works
This Scottish translator swaps English words for Scots ones: small becomes wee, child becomes bairn, know becomes ken. Each of its 190 words was checked in the Scottish National Dictionary. It writes words, not Scots grammar or an accent.
Read the full guide
English to Scots words
Type a sentence and the words in the table change: church to kirk, lake to loch, dreary to dreich. Everything else stays as typed, so the result is English with Scots words in it, not a sentence a Scots speaker would write.
Scottish to English translation
Swap reads Scots words back into English, the half you need for a poem or a message with bairn, ken or dreich in it. Burn, fit, gang, ken, ben and glen are also English words or names, so check those by eye.
- Everyday words convert best: small, child, girl, know, church, cold, old, good.
- The table has no insults, no drinking words and no made-up accent spellings.
Questions and answers
Is this a Scottish accent translator?
No. An accent is a sound, and a page cannot write one. This page changes words: it puts wee for small and ken for know, as the dictionary records them, and leaves your spelling alone everywhere else.
Is it a Scottish slang translator?
Not slang, though the words are everyday ones. Scots has dictionaries and a grammar of its own, and words such as bairn, dreich and scunnered belong to it. Insults and crude words are left out.
Is Scots the same as Scottish Gaelic?
No. Scots is a Germanic tongue, close kin to English. Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language. This page holds Scots words only, though the dictionary traces a few of them, such as loch and glen, to Gaelic.
Where do the words come from?
Every row was looked up in the Scottish National Dictionary, part of the Dictionaries of the Scots Language at dsl.ac.uk, and its headword is recorded beside it. A word with no entry of its own there was left out.